This new volume, Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama, is a clear-eyed look at the Vietnam War's fateful consequences -- especially subsequent wars -- up until the present in Afghanistan.

She learned to look upon danger clear-eyed and with understanding, losing forever that panic fear which is bred of ignorance and which afflicts the city-reared, making them as silly as silly horses, so that they await fate in frozen horror instead of grappling with it, or stampede in blind self-destroying terror which clutters the way with their crushed carcasses.

They were of many breeds, but their common life had formed of them a certain type, -- a lean and wiry type, with trail-hardened muscles, and sun-browned faces, and untroubled souls which gazed frankly forth, clear-eyed and steady.